Kremlin says Snowden is free to cooperate with German law enforcement

Nov 02 2013

RBTH

Interfax

The Kremlin believes former U.S. National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden is free to cooperate with German law enforcement agencies as concerns reports on the tapping of Chancellor Angela Merkel's telephone conversations by U.S. special services, Kommersant said in a report on a Saturday issue.

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"Nobody allows him to violate the Russian president's condition not to do harm to the U.S. But he is on Russian territory after lawfully acquiring temporary asylum, and therefore he is free to meet with anybody, and we can't obstruct this," Peskov said.

Snowden himself had said earlier that he had passed all his archive to Western journalists while in Hong Kong and had no access to it any longer, Kommersant said.

It was reported earlier that Snowden expressed willingness to assist the German authorities in investigating the tapping of Merkel's telephone conversations.

"I hope that, when the difficulties of this humanitarian situation have been resolved, I will be able to cooperate in the responsible finding of fact regarding reports in the media," Snowden said in a letter supposedly addressed to Merkel, which Bundestag member Hans-Christian Strobele publicized on Friday after coming home from Moscow.

The Suddeutsche Zeitung reported earlier referring to a document passed by Snowden that Merkel's telephone conversations could have been tapped from the U.S. Embassy in Berlin.